Phoenix Made of Smoke
by writerdragonfly
Summary: /Felicity feels the churning of guilt in the pit of her stomach as soon as the words are out. Not because she tells Oliver about his mother, about Merlyn, and Thea. No, that she doesn't regret because she cannot allow herself to. The knowledge she shared is important, so important. Oliver needs to know. What she regrets is the lie./ Felicity is a Hale!AU. Sterek, Olicity.
1. Prologue

**_Author's Note:_**

_This is truly a labor of love. Updates will be a bit sporadic, but I do actually have a few chapters completely written so hopefully I won't keep you all waiting for long. I owe a lot to the lovely Sam and the wonderful Westley. (deputydarrish &amp; lovelessayase on tumblr!)_

* * *

Christine Felicity Hale is born to Talia Meghan Hale on the first of August 1985. The section on her birth certificate reading "father" is left blank, though Talia knows exactly who it is. It is for her protection, her daughter's protection, and her daughter's father's protection that no record of him is attached to her.

-x-

She's almost two years old when her mother marries the omega who broke off from his pack in Sacramento. He's a good man, a good wolf, and that is all that matters in the end. She doesn't remember this-it's only years later, long after his death (and her mother's) that she finds out that he came to their family after her birth. That doesn't matter to her either. In the time that he was alive, he was her father as much as any man.

Within the year that follows, she watches her mother's stomach swell in gentle curves. Watches her glow with the gentle smiles.

Laura is born that July, and Christine's life changes with that moment.

-x-

It's not like she notices at first. She's a toddler when her sister is born, and she's used to the coming and going of omegas and breakaway family packs. But her mother's attention is less on her and more on her sister.

Christine is not a wolf. She doesn't need her mother's constant attention in quite the same way as Lore.

Derek is born when Christine is four, on Christmas Day. Their aunt makes werewolf Jesus jokes that year and every year following, and it makes Uncle Peter grin his wickedly creepy grin every time.

She doesn't notice that her mother and stepfather spend less time focused on her and more on her siblings until she's entering kindergarten.

It doesn't matter though. She knows her mother loves her.

Right?

-x-

Christine goes by Felicity in school, wears her middle name like a shield. Like a superhero identity. _This is who I am outside the supernatural._

She's several grades ahead of her peers, having spent her time alone scouring over books and researching on the internet, devouring knowledge as if it would fill some hole in her she didn't know she had.

She's wickedly smart, and she knows it.

She is in the summer between seventh and eighth grades when Cora is born. She's ten years old.

-x-

Of her siblings, growing up, Christine is closest to Derek. He's the quietest of her siblings, and could give Christine a run for her money in his potential if he had the chance.

But he doesn't. He won't.

Her siblings are home schooled until middle school out of necessity, to keep the secret. They don't have teachers in Beacon Hills in the know, and it means her siblings are taught by their father while her mother does her Alpha duties, and Christine is in school.

On nights when Derek is free from werewolf duties, he and Christine go up on the roof and she teaches him things that are beyond their father's scope of knowledge. It doesn't happen often, though it does happen more and more as he learns control.

Christine graduates Beacon Hills High School when she is fifteen years old. Derek won't go to school until the following year.

She almost waits.

-x-

Stanford is like a dream. There's a small pack among the teaching staff consisting of an Alpha and two betas, and they welcome her with open arms. She's a human born to one of the country's most famous Alphas, and it makes her some sort of prize.

She wows them with her talent, with her love of learning and tinkering and doing. She completes her first degree in two years, but continues on for more.

-x-

She's nineteen when she gets the call from Laura. It's probably just minutes ahead of her mother's attempt to call her, but Laura knew just as much as anyone how close Christine and Derek had always been.

"Paige is dead. Something happened, and she got bit, and Derek had to snap her neck."

She clears a week of classes away, takes time off her work study.

She goes to her brother's side.

-x-

Leaving Derek this time is one of the hardest things she's ever had to do.

"Derek. I'm coming back, okay? I have to finish out this degree, and then I am coming home. For good. Okay? And I'll visit, as much as I can."

And she does. She's back every weekend that she can scavenge enough time without sacrificing her work study, actually taking the money her mother offers instead of trying to make it on her own.

-x-

It's exactly four weeks before graduation when she gets a call from her Laura in the middle of the night.

"Chrissy... Felicity. Hunters burned down the house. Uncle Peter's in a coma and he's not healing. It's just me and Derek left. Don't go home. It's not safe. We're taking off."

"What? No, Lore-"

"Felicity. I will contact you as soon as it's safe. I'm going to take good care of Derek, okay? I'm... I'm the Alpha now."

And Felicity can hear it in her voice, the capital A. The honesty. The terror.

"No, I'll meet you somewhere. We can hide toget-"

"_Felicity_. You're in danger simply for being related to us. They will kill you if they find out you're alive."

"That I'm-_what_?"

"I can't explain right now. Stay away from Beacon Hills. Don't try and find us. I will call you when it's safe."

And before she can protest, there is a dial tone in her ear and a ringing in her head.

-x-

She calls the sheriff from an encrypted phone line early in the morning.

"Stilinski."

"... I think... I was home for the weekend."

"What? Who is this...?"

"I... Christine Hale was home for the weekend. Okay? She didn't make it out."

"There's no evidence-"

"I was home for the weekend, Sheriff Stilinski. Please, I... My family... They're... Gone. I can't..."

There is a long silence.

"You're asking me to commit a crime, Felicity."

"I'm asking you to give me a second chance."

-x-

In the end, she knows the evidence of her return piles up as truth. She knows it's a lie. The sheriff does too. But she's good at what she does.

In the ashes of the Hale Fire, Christine Felicity Hale dies.

And miles away, Smoak rises.

-x-

Felicity Meghan Smoak is born on December 25th, 1988. She's an only child born to a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas. She isn't close to her mother, and she has no one else.

_A whole new identity. A whole new life._

-x-

During her first year at MIT, under her new name, she's stalked by a cocky young man who plays lacrosse and it's one of the most disconcerting moments of her life.

At first she thinks he's a hunter. When he turns out to be as mundane and human as anyone, she doesn't relax.

There are monsters with teeth and claws and wolfsbane bullets. And there are monsters of the mundane, human kind. She needs to remember that.

-x-

Working at Queen Consolidated is... an experience. She loves it, most of the time. She has her projects and tasks, her troubleshooting and...

At home she has her things the way she likes them.

Her old cell phone, long outdated and lacking all the gadgetry and apps of her newer phones, still sits at her side every night.

Every time she boots up her computer, every time she opens a browser, every time she picks up her phone or her tablet, she thinks about looking up the fire, about booking tickets back to Beacon Hills, about finding Laura and Derek.

It itches to do something, _anything_.

She keeps to what her Alpha asked of her.

She waits. Her little pink cell phone still active under the name Christine Felicity Hale stays charged and ready, waiting for a call that never comes.

Time passes slowly.


	2. Chapter One

-x-

**Chapter One**

-x-

Felicity feels the churning of guilt in the pit of her stomach as soon as the words are out. Not because she tells Oliver about his mother, about Merlyn, and Thea. No, that she doesn't regret because she cannot allow herself to. The knowledge she shared is important, so important. Oliver needs to know.

What she regrets is the _lie_.

Too practiced to not come out.

She doesn't want secrets from Oliver. He's too important and his trust in her is too... important.

And she hates herself a little for not telling the truth then.

_Most of my family is dead and I haven't heard from my surviving siblings in six years._

She tells the lie instead.

-x-

When she's alone in her little apartment afterward, snuggled up in her fleece pajamas with her hands gripped tightly around a mug of hot chocolate, she starts to think. She starts to get scared that Laura and Derek are gone, that they're dead and if she'd only looked sooner she'd-she'd have been able to save them.

She cracks twenty minutes later, breaks her promise to Laura from so long ago.

Laura's cell phone number connects to a teenage girl who'd had the number for ages, and that doesn't really surprise her. She didn't expect Laura to keep her cell number, not really. But she hoped it would be easy.

She had hoped...

Felicity is nothing if not determined though, setting her old phone down on the coffee table next to her hot chocolate, picking up her tablet and flipping it open.

She starts a search.

-x-

Laura Elizabeth Hale died in January. She died in the Beacon Hills Preserve, alone. There had been an arrest in connection with the case, but when it turned out to be an animal attack the suspect was released.

She finds a wanted poster for Derek Hale, a hand drawn rendering of her brother looking both ages older and achingly young, accompanying it.

It makes her heart twist painfully in her chest.

Seeing the newspaper headline, _"Derek Hale Cleared of All Charges"_, only sates her a little.

What must Derek have gone through, when Laura died? When he lost her, like he'd lost them?

And why hadn't Laura called her? Why had Laura gone back to Beacon Hills at all? Why had Derek? Why hadn't _Derek_ called her the moment Laura died?

-x-

Did Derek even know that she had been waiting for them to bring her home?

-x-

Felicity books the ticket to San Francisco two days before she gathers the courage to talk to Oliver about her leaving.

It sits in the bottom of her purse, gently slipped under everything else as not to be damaged.

She constantly thinks about it.

-x-

"I need to... I need to do something, Oliver. I fly out in the morning. I'll be gone a week."

She doesn't feel like the words belong to her. Doesn't feel like they came out of her mouth.

"What's wrong?" And there Oliver is, knowing without her saying anything, that something is wrong.

But she can't tell him, not like this. She can't admit to the trust she betrayed with her secret past and her lies. She's too wired up, too worried about the little brother, and too scared of how he will react to do this _now_.

"I can't talk about this now. I promise, as soon as I'm back I'll... I'll tell you."

She's terrified to hear the truth in her own words.

But Oliver deserves to know, doesn't he? Hasn't he been trusting her with all he is without her doing the same in return?

-x-

By the time her plane lands in San Francisco, her fingers ache from tightly gripping her arm rests. She feels a sick pull in her stomach, but she tries to ignore it.

She rents a car from one of the big name car rental places out of the airport, giving a hefty deposit over. The cost of the trip is already dipping into her system repair funds, but she doesn't let herself think about that.

Instead, she drives white knuckled the entire way to her hometown.

-x-

Beacon Hills isn't exactly the same as in her memory, but it's close enough. The city has grown wider, but the core parts are still the same.

She drives to the bed and breakfast on Third, staring up at the beautiful old house for several minutes before driving away. It's been relabeled an antique store, the old Hale Inn sign replaced with fanciful metal one with a name she can't bring herself to take in.

She shouldn't be surprised that one of her family's properties now belongs to someone else.

It still hurts.

-x-

She checks into the cheap little motel on State Street and collapses into a musty smelling pillow and cries for what feels like hours. She hasn't gathered the courage to go see the house yet, to see the burnt husk of the place she had lived her entire life.

Felicity gets to her old house at dusk that night. There are construction lights set up around the perimeter of the land the house was on, surrounded in chain link fence.

It's mostly just heaps of blackened wood and charred cement left, the shell of it having been torn down by hands and machinery.

She wonders of it would have been better or worse to have seen it standing, _still_.

Her fingers are smeared with black ash from the boards of the house, and she's pretty sure there is a smear across her cheeks from wiping away tears.

Being at the house had been so hard, and seeing it as a torn down wreckage hadn't helped.

But it was proof that they were gone and she wished she hadn't waited so long to go after it.

-x-

There's a plot in the cemetery for her family. None of them are actually buried there. Except, apparently, for Laura.

Her mother had buried her stepfather in the plot on their land in the woods, alongside countless other Hales over the years.

But whoever took care of the funeral, whoever paid for the headstones? They put them all together in the cemetery closest to the preserve.

There are nine headstones, and Laura's is still new.

Hers is among them, right between Talia and Cora.

Someone has carved triskelions into each stone after the fact, and she knows it because it's not a precise cut. It doesn't match.

She thinks it was Derek.

Him and Peter are the only two without headstones here.

She hopes that's a sign that she's not as alone as she has felt for so long.

Not that having Uncle Peter back would be a good thing. She had never much cared for him, and he for her. She never knew what he had against her, other than the lack of wolfishness since her birth, and she found him manipulative and a bit creepy.

Not that it mattered. She wouldn't search for him, anyway.

She places a kiss to her fingertips and gently touched Laura's headstone.

"I'm sorry, Lore. I should have been your big sister first... I should have... I shouldn't have listened to you."

Guilt climbs up her throat like a vine, choking down words before they can spill out.

-x-

There is an industrial property that her family still owns according to the city, and the utility bills on it are all paid up, if the usage is incredibly low.

She remembers her aunt working on plans to retrofit it into classy apartments, starting the changes and filing the permits. But it never been finished, because the fire had taken her aunt's life just as quickly as her mother's.

Staring up at the imposing building now, she wonders if she can rustle up the courage to actually go inside.

-x-

The lower levels are half gutted of what accouterments the apartments had gathered, layers of spray paint on walls and floors making the already creepy building nothing short of haunting.

She recognizes the mess of drug paraphernalia scattered about and it makes her nervous.

Why would they pay for power and water and gas to part of the building but leave _this_ here?

She doesn't find anyone on the lower floors, and the upper floors are currently inaccessible from the lower floors from the inside, so she leaves the them and heads to the service entrance on the far side.

The call button for the elevator works, and she rides up the rusty gated box to the top floor, choosing it based on the circle worn into the button from considerable use.

It creaks to a halt half an inch lower than it should, but that doesn't bother her much. She climbs out and heads to the huge door a few feet away.

Felicity has one hand on her cell phone as she knocks with the other, and she tenses when she hears noise from within.

"Stiles, why did I give you a key if you're just going to-" and that's her brother's voice from the other side of the door. That's his face-_so much older_-eyes wide with shock that peers at her from the now open door.

That's Derek, in front of her. Wholly alive.

_"Issy?"_

And with his whisper of her nickname, Felicity falls apart.

-x-

_**Author's Note:**_

_Look, chapter one! Please don't expect chapter two to come nearly as fast. I want to write chapter four before I post it. I hope you enjoyed it!_


	3. Chapter Two

_**Author's Note: **_

_I am absolutely BLOWN AWAY at the reception this has been getting. Over 121 subscribers between here and AO3! I hope you continue to enjoy it. The next few chapters were incredibly difficult to write, so I hope you like them. The next chapter will be posted as soon as I finish writing chapter five, so please be patient with me. This is definitely going to be continued. :)_

_And our plot should be picking up soon. :3_

**-x-**

**Chapter Two**

**-x-**

Felicity has her arms around Derek before she even knows what she's doing. Her grip is tight, her face pressed into his chest. It takes only a few seconds for his arms to wrap tightly around her, his chin resting on her head.

"Where have you been?" Derek asks after a moment, releasing her in order to lead her inside.

"I was waiting... Laura told me to wait, that she would call me when it was safe. And I kept waiting..." She doesn't like how broken she sounds, how helpless. This is her baby brother, her last remaining sibling. And she's acting like he's the adult here, like he's her elder.

And she hates that. She's supposed to be his big sister; he's supposed to come to her for guidance and comfort.

But she's been alone for so long, so far removed from what was left of the tattered remains of her family... She doesn't know how she fits anymore.

**-x-**

"I'm so glad you're back, Issy," Derek murmurs into her shoulder when she pulls him close again.

"I'm sorry I didn't find you sooner. You shouldn't have been alone, you never should have been alone."

**-x-**

"Did you come back, after the fire?" Derek asks from where he stands in front of his stove, stirring the stir fry in his pan with a wooden spoon.

"No... I... I couldn't," she answered, using a candy cane to stir her cup of hot chocolate. Derek looked back at her where she sat in his only kitchen chair, her knees propped up to rest under her chin.

"Why now?"

And that's the question isn't it?

"I... I lied to my best friend about who I was. He doesn't trust... almost anyone. And my default was to lie to him, Derek. I had... I had to find out if there was anyone left..."

**-x-**

Derek's cooking is good. It surprises her more than it should. But, there are a lot of things about her brother that are completely different than the slightly scrawny baby faced boy she remembers.

They're eating next to each other on his couch, talking about the last book they'd read in common when his phone rings.

He answers it with a faint smile, his little bunny teeth peeking out and _oh my god_, he still has them!

He places it on speaker phone after saying hello and it takes Felicity a best longer than it should to place the other voice.

_"What was so important that you had to have my Alpha interrupt my date, Derek?"_

"Cora? You're alive?" Felicity blurts out, her eyes pricking with tears.

_"Chrissy?_" And Cora sounds so little, so broken.

"Yes. It's me, Coraline."

**-x-**

Felicity leaves after the teary phone call with her baby sister, after she's helped Derek wash their plates and packaged up the leftovers.

She tells him she'll be back and she means it.

She heads to her hotel and packs her bags up again. Within half an hour, she's back at the loft with everything she'd brought with her.

Derek is wearing sleep clothes when she gets back, and the ratty tank and sweatpants show off the difference in his muscle size over the years a lot more than the soft sweater and blue jeans had.

He looks comfortable though, just as much as he had before.

She thinks it looks good on him, and it's not just the clothes.

**-x-**

"You didn't know if I was alive, did you?" She asks him on the balcony, looking out at the stars.

"Laura told me you were safe, once. That you'd come to us. I didn't... I didn't know you were waiting to be called home. I just kept waiting for you."

And that hurts.

Felicity thinks she understands why Laura did it. Keep the full humans safe first-that's always been an unspoken motto in the Hale family pack. But it hurts, badly.

Felicity can handle Laura leaving her in the dark, not calling her home, not telling her they were safe. She can handle that.

But Laura not telling Derek anything is near impossible to deal with.

"Enough with the sappy stuff. I need to sleep. Direct me to a bed, oh brother, my brother."

There's only one bed in his loft-his words for the strange apartment, not hers-and a pile of blankets in one of the spare rooms. She doesn't know why the apartment is sparse, and she's so thrown by everything of the past few hours that she doesn't ask.

"You can take the bed," Derek says, nodding towards it. She snorts.

"I'm not taking your bed, Derek. I can go back to the motel to sleep if-"

"You're not going back to a motel, Issy. Just take the bed."

Felicity sighs, thinking about arguing again. But she looks at her brother and remembers how much time together they've _lost_ because she thought to listen to her Alpha instead of what her heart insisted was right.

"It's a big bed. We can share. If... If you're okay with that?"

Felicity isn't used to sharing a bed. Not with anyone. She hasn't slept with anyone in months, and even then she hadn't had the opportunity to actually sleep beside anyone.

She knows it's weird. But she remembers being sixteen and curling up in bed with Laura and Derek and Cora the night before she left for college and just being there together. Pack, family, forever.

Derek nods.

"Okay."

**-x-**

They don't snuggle, or cuddle. They don't even face each other, let alone touch. There's a comfort though, in knowing the other is _right there_.

Despite that, she lies awake for a while, her brain whirring through the events of the day, of the night.

"I'll get you a mattress tomorrow."

Felicity sits up at that, looks at her younger brother.

She doesn't speak, can't make herself. Instead she reaches over and squeezes his shoulder before curling back into her side of the bed.

And it is enough.

**-x-**

It's nearly four in the morning when Derek suddenly shifts, making enough noise and movement to startle her awake. She throws on a sweater before she follows him out of the bedroom, blinking blearily awake.

"I'm sorry, I know it's like the middle of the night, but I had to see-"

There's a teenage boy standing in the middle of her brother's living room. He's wearing an oversized blue hoodie and plaid patterned sleep pants. One of his shoes is untied.

And he looks like he's hardly slept in days.

She thinks he looks familiar, but she cannot place him in her mental catalog.

"It's fine. Another nightmare?" Her brother asks him and yeah, this is weird.

"Sorry, dude. Didn't expect you to have a girl over-" the kid says. She interrupts him unintentionally with a snort.

"Definitely _not_ like that, kid," she follows up, looking between him and her brother.

Derek sighs.

"Go back to bed, Issy." Derek says, and it kind of makes her want to growl at him.

"How about, instead of me going back to sleep, you tell me why a teenage boy is coming to your apartment in the middle of the night?" She blurts out instead, crossing her arms like she meant to say it. The boy smirks at her brother when she does it.

"Didn't mean to get your new girlfriend upset with you, Derek. I can go..."

"It is definitely not like that. No. Ewww. Not that he isn't attractive, objectively speaking but no, definitely not into incest." Felicity rambles, wincing when she realises what she's said. The boy grins at her when he realises who she is.

"Lissy Hale? Derek, it's like all your dead family is coming out of the woodwork-Peter, Cora, Lissy. Who's next, your mother?"

"No, Stiles. My mother is dead. Issy, can we talk about this later?"

The atmosphere gets heavy again, like a woolen blanket has been placed on their shoulders. It's uncomfortable and makes her uneasy.

"Stiles Stilinski? The sheriff's kid?" Felicity asks, focusing on that instead of her brother's request.

"Do you know any other Stiles?" The kid asks with a smirk. And yeah, point.

"How do you know my brother?" She honestly wants to know. There aren't any circumstances she can put to mind that _don't_ make her brother look bad right now.

"Oh, Derek and I go way back. Feels like decades." Stiles answers, and_ her brother rolls his eyes._

"It hasn't even been a year, Stiles. Can we talk about this in the morning, Christine?" Derek asks her and, yeah. That kind of hurts.

"That's not my name, Derek. It hasn't been my name in almost seven years." She swallows hard after she says it. This is definitely a conversation that Stiles Stilinski does _not_ need to be present for, but she can't help it.

Derek _never_ called her Christine. And no one had called her that since she was twenty years old and totally and completely on her own for the first time.

"Derek, I'll be okay. You should talk to her." Stiles tries to leave, but Felicity interrupts.

"No, Stiles. I don't understand why you're here, but you obviously need him. I'll go get coffee and breakfast while you guys talk. I doubt any of us are going back to sleep."

She'd been told before, that she was too self-sacrificing. It had been in reference to doing whatever Oliver needed at the expense of her own damn heart, then. But she knew it was probably just as true now.

She didn't need to be a wolf to sense that the two of them were something more than friends, even if she wasn't sure how.


	4. Chapter Three

**-x-**

**Chapter Three**

**-x-**

She's only mildly embarrassed by walking into the all night diner in her pajamas. The waitress doesn't recognise her, and the cook who had been playing solitaire at the bar when she walked in only looked vaguely familiar and said nothing to her anyway.

She ordered to-go meals for three and tipped a bit more than she normally would, and the waitress smiled brightly when she saw it. It made her feel _good_.

It takes almost half an hour before she's back at her brother's loft, and when she walks inside it's to see Stiles laying on the couch upside down, his legs over the back of it. He's chewing on a hoodie string and talking about scoville levels and whether or not Derek would test them with him.

He looks comfortable and at ease, and the tilt of a smile on her brother's face makes her feel happy for having made the decision to leave.

"I got your favorite," Felicity says, waving the bag of styrofoam boxes at her brother. He looks up and smiles even brighter at her.

"Blueberry pancakes with bacon, three eggs over hard, hash browns and wheat toast?" Stiles asks with a smirk when she hands over the first box to Derek. So, the kid definitely knows her brother. And that feels very... weird.

She pulls out the box for Stiles, just a random platter choice because while she may have spent a fair bit of time with him during her summers home from college before the fire, they didn't exactly eat breakfast together. He thanks her as he flips back around and gets up to take it from her. Derek doesn't look perturbed at all, just hands him a fork and plate, and then a bottle of Tabasco sauce like Stiles had asked for it. She realises then that she'd noticed the bottle hours earlier without thinking anything of the fact that her brother didn't like it.

This kid is over enough that Derek knows what he wants without asking, enough that he buys things for him.

"Does your dad know you're here?" She asks suddenly, scrapping her own food from the container to her plate.

"Texted him when I headed over, yeah. He's on shift until eight. Parrish has the flu or something and Haigh is a jackass who doesn't like working overnights so Dad only makes him twice a week," Stiles says through a mouthful of egg. It's kind of disgusting.

"I thought Tara usually-" and the look on Stiles' face stops her short.

"Tara was murdered a few months ago," Stiles says haltingly, casting a strange look towards her brother. And... _what_?

"Why are you looking at Derek? He didn't do it, right?" Felicity feels decidedly uneasy now. How much did she miss by refusing to look further until she talked to Derek?

"No, I didn't kill her," her brother answered. He didn't give anything else, just stared at his plate. Stiles looked away.

"He was dating my English teacher and she turned out to be bat-shit crazy. Enough said."

And Felicity feels lost at that. She feels like she could have stopped, could have helped, could have been able to do something if she hadn't listened to Laura.

She's counting in her head "1, 2, 3, 4, 5..." to stave off a panic attack when her brother's voice cuts through.

"Issy? Are you okay?"

And she's not. She's not okay. While she was off aiding and abetting a vigilante on a crime spree in Starling City, her brother was here in Beacon Hills getting wrongfully arrested for murder, and dealing with Laura's death on his own, and finding out his girlfriend was a murderer... And all he had was what? This teenage boy?_ Because that was healthy._

"I should have been here. I should have told Laura I didn't care if she was the Alpha-" and she stops because this teenager probably does not understand what the hell she's blabbering about.

"You probably would have been killed like eight times by now if you'd been here." It's not her brother that assuages her worries, but Stiles. His face is tight and pained, and she wonders what it was that made him that way.

She can remember coming to the sheriff's station when he was a kid, working on the computers and digitizing data for his dad. She can remember the way he buzzed about, his face wide with a grin and his eyes alight with curiosity.

She can remember him sitting next to her while she took apart the sheriff's desktop one day. His fingers constantly moving, playing with the hem of his shirt, tapping the beat of a song on the edge of the desk, carding through his short hair and messing it up. And he asked questions._ So many questions_. He was brilliant, even then. He loved knowledge and soaked it up like a sponge and it didn't matter if she rambled on about specs and went off on tangents about parts because he loved listening to her and asking her questions and then he would flit off when she was done and tell anyone who would listen almost word for word what he had told her. And that smile would never leave his face. He was a happy kid, and a good one. Even if he tended to be a troublemaker at times, he had always been happy and bright.

But this Stiles is different. This Stiles is seventeen years old now, and he reacts like he's twice that. He reacts in ways that remind her uncannily of Oliver Queen. And his smile when he turns to her doesn't reach his eyes and she knows that smile.

Her brother wore that smile earlier and Oliver wears it all the time and that is a brittle smile. Fake but trying. And it aches.

"I should have been here. For whatever you both had to go through. I should have been here the whole time." And she means it. She doesn't owe Stiles anything. She'd been a friend, perhaps even an unofficial babysitter in the summers. But he hadn't been pack. She knows that he is now. He's a part of her brother's pack whether he's aware of the supernatural world or not. She can see it, can feel it.

And even if he wasn't, he doesn't deserve to look like he's been run through hell and forced to keep going.

If she had come back, after the fire, maybe she could have helped them all...

"I should have been your sister first, Derek." She says it as a statement instead of a question. She means it.

Her phone goes off suddenly from back in the bedroom, and it's then that it occurs to her that it's been a long time since she even checked it. She didn't even take it with her to the diner and she's not used to not always having it on her.

She sets her barely eaten food down and slips away from the tense room to collect her phone. It's Oliver calling her and it makes her even more uneasy than she had been before.

"Oliver?" She tries to make herself sound tired, like he'd woken her up, but she's not sure it works.

"I thought you were going to call when you got wherever you were going safe, Felicity."

"I'm sorry, I meant to call. It's just been a little emotional. I'm sorry." She can hear his breathing over the line and knows that he had been worried, and she knows that he is one step from asking what is going on but he doesn't.

"You are safe, though?"

"Probably the safest place I could be right now."

"But I don't see you with me right now," and she knows as soon as she hears it that it's half serious but meant as an attempt at a joke. An attempt to cheer her up.

"Second safest, then. Are you okay?" She asks him, sinking down onto her brother's bed again.

"Now that I know you're okay I am."

She smiles at his response, and takes a moment just to listen to him breathing.

"Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone, okay?" She asks.

"I'll try not to."

"Be safe, Oliver. Please."

"I will."

And that is enough.

**-x-**

Derek gives her a funny look when she comes back out, but she shakes it off without saying anything.

"My boss, I didn't call him when my plane landed." It's the truth, and she knows Derek can tell. It doesn't stop him from looking confused and she doesn't blame him. Oliver and herself have never really had the kind of relationship that they should have. It's always been different, always been hard to qualify.

"So... What's been happening in Beacon Hills in the past seven years?"

**-x-**

They don't tell her everything, of course. In fact, she doesn't learn much. Stiles says a few vague things about the town, and Derek doesn't say much at all. It's like she's a stranger and they don't know how to talk to her.

And maybe that's true. It's been nearly seven years since she last saw Derek, and a few conversations about her finishing school and what they've read recently aside, she doesn't know him that well anymore.

He might like the same breakfast food but he's changed a lot. Grown up a lot.

And Stiles is different too.

"So... Does he know, Derek?" Felicity asks after an awkward pause. Derek looks at her oddly again, before he finally gets it.

"His best friend is my Alpha." And at that, Felicity feels like her brain has exploded. _What?_

"You're not the Alpha? But when Laura died-"

"The whole Alpha thing is way more complicated than you think. Like, way more. That's like a week's worth of stories there. At least. And yeah, Scott's totally the Alpha now."

"Scott?" Felicity asks, trying to piece together what neither idiot is saying.

"Scott McCall... He was the boy with asthma and a mop of hair that used to wreak havoc with me at my dad's office until you'd agree to run us to the park for an hour." Stiles grins at her.

The boy with... _what?_

"Laura bit a teenage boy?" Felicity asks incredulously. _And Stiles laughs._

* * *

End Notes:

Things have been a little bit hectic, but I think you've all waited long enough for a new chapter. ;)

I am working on the next bit now, so hopefully it shouldn't be much longer before that's up. And then the plot will pick up. :)


	5. Chapter Four

**-x-**

**Chapter Four**

**-x- **

When Stiles tells her what Peter had done, her first instinct is to call Oliver and tell him. Her first instinct is _revenge_. It should taste bitter in her mouth but it only tastes _right._

What stops her isn't love or affection for Peter. Felicity had never liked her uncle. No, what stops her is the look on Derek's face. That _haunted_ look.

"We killed Peter... It didn't stick, because his backup plans have backup plans. How did he even know Lydia was a banshee? Does she smell different or something?" Stiles says, turning to Derek at the end when he asks his questions.

And then it hits Felicity.

_We killed Peter._

_Stiles, this **kid**, this sarcastic brilliant kid, helped **her brother **kill someone._

"You... you killed Peter?"

Stiles looks down at his hands, flexing them oddly. But when he looks up there is no shame in his face.

"The night we killed him, he bit the girl and left her to die. He kidnapped me, showed me his dead nurse's body, and made me find Derek by hacking Scott's GPS. He threatened to bite me, and then he bent my car keys so I couldn't go after him. I don't regret helping Derek kill him. I only regret that he didn't stay dead."

Derek is staring at Stiles when she turns to look at him, and she can't place the strange look on his face for anything. It's something she doesn't recognize and... it makes her feel so out of place.

"The girl he bit... did she survive?" Felicity asks, trying not to focus on all the other wrong things in what Stiles had said.

"Yeah. She's a banshee now though."

"A banshee," she asks incredulously.

"Our pack isn't very... traditional," Derek says with a hint of a smile.

"I'm getting that impression... Now, tell me what really happened after Peter... died..."

**-x-**

It's nearly eight in the morning by the time Stiles and Derek are done telling her about the Kanima and the Alpha Pack and the Darach. It feels like she's listened to all the terrifying fairy tales her mother had told her growing up, and she _hates _that these are things that happened to her brother, to the cute little hyperactive kid she used to teach how to rebuild computers on her summer semesters home from college.

She hates that these things really happened, that they happened here to people she likes and loves, and that she never knew what was happening back here in Beacon Hills while she was playing around with Oliver and the Hood and... and everything else in Starling City.

"You should head out. Scott will get worried if you don't show up to first period," Derek says before they even broach the subject of what happened after Derek and Cora left Beacon Hills.

Stiles gives Derek a strange look, but he nods.

"Thank you..." Stiles says softly, before throwing his hoodie back on and slipping into his tennis shoes.

"I'll be back after school," the teen says as he makes his escape out of the loft.

"What was that about?" Felicity asks, concern lacing her tone. Derek doesn't speak for several long minutes.

"What do you remember about mom's stories about kitsune?"

**-x-**

The word feels heavy in her head. _Nogitsune._

She understands then, why Derek gave Stiles an out. Something like that... cannot be easy to talk about. To remember. Something like that would eat away at you long after it was gone.

Maybe she was right to think that something about Stiles' smile reminded her of Oliver.

They're eating just after eleven as they sit on Derek's couch when his phone goes off. He stares at it for several long minutes, his sandwich still in his hand several inches above his plate.

When he looks up at her, his eyes look so unbearably sad.

"I... Stiles thinks I should tell you... about Kate Argent," Derek says as he looks back down, setting his sandwich on the plate on his lap, "and I think he's right."

"The hunter Peter killed for starting the fire?" She asked, swallowing hard over the words.

"My girlfriend."

**-x-**

Felicity wishes, in that moment, that Kate Argent was still alive. That she could point Oliver in her direction and watch as he took her down.

It makes her a little sick to think that. That she could be capable of wishing death upon two people, enough that she would be willing to break the code that Oliver set himself.

She pulls her brother into a hug, holds him as tightly as she can manage. It's one of those moments where her heart feels like it's been torn apart and she just wishes so badly that she had been there for Derek. Through all of this, and before.

She wishes she had asked for deferment when Paige died... would Kate have been able to dig her nails into him then?

She's pretty sure she's crying, and she's also pretty sure her brother might be too.

They stay like that for a long time, lunch long abandoned.

**-x-**

Felicity is in the middle of a conversation about going to school at MIT when Stiles lets himself into the loft just after two thirty.

"School isn't over yet, Stiles," her brother states with a raised eyebrow. Stiles just smirks.

"So I skipped study hall. Big deal. So, Lissy, are you all caught up on our local hellmouth now?" Stiles answers, sitting on Derek's couch with a thump.

"Hellmouth? Really, Stiles?" Derek asks and Felicity can't help the laugh that spills out.

"What? The nemeton is supposedly a beacon for everything that goes bump in the night. It's like the perfect name for it."

"He's right, Derek." Felicity says, her smile wide on her face. Stiles' eyes are bright and he seems genuinely happy for the first time since he'd come into the loft in the early morning hours.

"She knows everything, Stiles," Derek answers finally with a fake sigh, his own lips twitching up to match theirs.

"What has the great and honorable Christine Felicity Hale been up the past seven years?" Stiles asks, and immediately the easy atmosphere of the room vanishes into something tense and dark.

"I... My name isn't... Christine Felicity Hale died in the fire, okay?" She swallows hard, before taking a deep, calming breath.

"What's your name?" Derek is the one to ask, and she wants nothing more than to wrap him in a blanket and read him stories, to go back to being fifteen and excited to tell him about what she'd learned and...

But she can't go back. None of them can.

"Smoak... Felicity Meghan Smoak. I... I couldn't... I know it's not the best identity change, but I couldn't... I couldn't lose everything."

Felicity wants to cry again. A part of her feels like it's happening all over again, like she's being stripped of her identity and strapped into a new one that doesn't fit.

And maybe she is. Maybe she's losing part of Felicity and getting part of Hale back in the process.

"Do you have a job? I've been telling Derek he should think about applying to be a deputy under my dad instead of stalking teenagers all day."

Her brother glares at Stiles before looking up at her curiously. She'd made mention of having a job in IT, but beyond that they hadn't spoken much about it.

"I work for Queen Consolidated in Starling City. I was in IT and tech support for a few years, but I... I'm a personal assistant now." She doesn't want to look at her brother, too afraid to see something disappointed in his face. It implies something, going from tech support to secretarial, implies that she's nothing more than...

"How'd you go from working in IT to being a PA?" Stiles asks, no sign of caring about the implication on his face.

"Well... Oliver needed a lot of tech support, and it just... went from there." She admits, trying not to reveal anymore about the situation if she could help it. It wouldn't do to just tell everyone Oliver's secrets.

"As in Oliver _Queen_? The billionaire?" Derek asks, surprise in his tone that has her looking at him. His face seems just as surprised as his voice.

"Well, he's not exactly a billionaire anymore." She blurts out in response, and she's thinking through a good cover when it hits her.

_She's about to lie to Derek._

She spent so long with an ache inside her at the fact that she was lying to Oliver regularly about who she used to be, and she's about to lie to her brother about who she is now. _What does that make her?_

**-x-**

"What do you know about the... _vigilante_... in Starling City?"

**-x-**

While Stiles seems to know quite a bit more about the Hood than she'd expected (which, she really should have expected more-this is _Stiles_, even as a kid he was obsessed with comic books and caped crusaders), Derek knows next to nothing.

Stiles takes over the bulk of the explaining, but it's only when she interrupts him to make an interjection about how a situation _actually_ went, when she can see Derek get it.

"You said you were still in IT. Last night. You work for this... Hood... don't you?" He asks, and she nods.

"The Arrow. I... I work for the Arrow."

Stiles is stunned into silence, and she can't even begin to place the look on her brother's face.

"Derek-"

"How? He's basically a _hunter_, Felicity. How could you...?"

She thinks that Derek is right to be angry. She knows how angry she'd been when she found Oliver Queen bleeding in her backseat, how easily she rejected his offering to join his vengeance seeking team.

But she remembers Walter Steele. She remembers finding out she'd helped rid the streets of Vertigo, and she remembers being part of something bigger.

She remembers five hundred and three people who died. And she remembers, vividly, how many more she helped to save.

"Oliver has done more for Starling City than anyone will ever know, Derek! He's not the same man as he was when he first put on that hood. He's a hero, and I..."

_And I love him_ is what runs through her head before Stiles cuts her off with a strangled and loud, "_Oliver Queen is the vigilante?"_

It takes a minute as she stumbles over that thought, as she thinks about the fact that she just outed Oliver as the Arrow for the second time, as she wonders if Derek will forgive her for what she's a part of.

"Yes, he is. Derek, please-"

"Just... give me a minute," Derek says, and he's off towards his bedroom without another word.

She tries to pretend her heart isn't breaking a little when the door slams shut but-judging by the look on Stiles' face-she doesn't think it works.


End file.
